WWE WrestleMania XIX

Where superstars become legends.

NA release: 8th September 2003
EU release: 19th September 2003
JP release: 7th November 2003
Developer: Yuke’s
Publisher: THQ (NA/EU), Yuke’s (JP)
NGC Magazine Score: 68%
Mods Used: None

With the Smackdown games – which are generally considered to be the best wrestling games of this generation – being exclusive to PS2, this left with the GameCube getting a rather odd assortment of them instead, none of which reached the same heights, despite being made by the same developer. Wrestlemania XIX is rather strange in that it ditches the career mode entirely and replaces it with a story.

Your wrestler of choice gets kicked out of the WWE by Vince McMahon and violently thrown out. You’re then brought to the office of his daughter, Stephanie. She wants to destroy her father’s business so wants you to destroy aspects regarding the setup of Wrestlemania XIX in order to prevent the event from happening, which results in a load of missions.

The first is during the construction of the arena being used for the event and your first task is to murder loads of construction workers. You don’t just beat them up, you have to throw them off the building to their deaths. Other missions have you assaulting security in a mall in order to destroy WWE merchandise and smashing security into cars before throwing dock workers into the sea. Once this is all done, Stephanie reveals that there was fine print: she has set up her own Wrestlemania to take over WWE and you have to beat up her father as the main event. It’s rather crazy.

The core gameplay of this is the same wrestling, which is not suited for fighting multiple opponents. It also means you’ll need to know the right moves to get people to land in the correct spots or to throw them off ledges properly. So while the plot is absurd, it’s not very enjoyable to actually play. The rest of the game is standard fare (with no career mode) although the character creator is a mixed bag as you can adjust the shape of many parts of the face and body, but there aren’t a lot of clothing options to choose from.

Fine

Your wrestler also has a number of stats, ranked out of ten, which start of rock bottom, but points too can be bought from Stacy with cash. Too easily, as it turns out. After an afternoon of playing, our creation Blue Lightning was rated a solid 10/10 across the board. What’s the point of that?
Tom Mayo, NGC Magazine #85

Remake or remaster?

There are other wrestling games to focus one.

Official Ways to get the game

There is no official way to get WWE Wrestlemaina XIX.